The present invention relates to web services or services provided over a network, such as the Internet or private network, and more particularly to a method and system for implementing authorization policies for web services.
Controlling access to services, such as web services or the like, offered via the Internet, private network or similar network to only authorized users may present challenges. This may be particularly challenging in the circumstance where a single Universal Resource Locator (URL) offers different services to multiple different groups of authorized users. In a Simple Object Process Protocol/HyperText Transfer Protocol (SOAP/HTTP) the URL corresponding to the HTTP binding may be protected. This may be appropriate protection where the URL only offers the web service to be protected but may not be sufficient in the case described above where multiple restricted access web services may be handled under the same URL.
The web service may be protected closer to the service implementation; for example, the Sun Microsystems™ Enterprise JavaBeans™ code utilized in association with a Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE®) model may be protected using J2EE access security. Java, Enterprise JavaBeans and Sun Microsystems are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States, other countries or both. One issue with this type of security arrangement is that performing access control may be difficult when a gateway, proxy server or the like is involved. There may be various layers that may be able to perform access control which need to be handled consistently across the various layers.